


You Never Take Me Dancing

by VoluptuousPanic



Category: Babylon Berlin (TV)
Genre: Bad Cops, Berlin (City), Canon Divergence, Drugs, Dual Canon, F/M, Good Time Gals, Human Resources, It'll End in Tears - Freeform, Kreuzberg, Not Total Angst, Sexy Eye Bags, Spoilers, Weimar Republic Obsessions, Working Girls, Workplace Relationship, nightclubbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-27 12:53:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19013314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoluptuousPanic/pseuds/VoluptuousPanic
Summary: A wild night...and after.





	You Never Take Me Dancing

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: SPOILERZ FOR BOTH BOOKS AND YR TV PICTURE SHOWS. 
> 
> Because I read the books first and have some idea of the future trajectory--while being thrilled with what Handloegten, Borries, and Tykwer doing--I’m working somewhere in between. Berlin is my favorite place on earth, Kottbusser Tor is gross now and was probably gross when it was new, and my opinions are hopelessly biased.

When Gereon turned away from the station newstand, pocketing change, his packet of Overstolz and Charly's packet of Juno, he found Charly joined by another girl. They, together and laughing, were fending off the advances and promises of quick cash from a pair of family men out on the prowl. Wordlessly, with a surge of unexpected possessiveness and unfamiliar, frankly horny virility, Gereon insinuated himself between Charly and her friend, slipping his arms around their waifish waists as he met the gaze of both men whose faces fell with disappointment. As johns they were amateurs, Gereon was moreso, but the ruse worked. Charly turned her face into his neck and her body into his open coat, laughing unabashedly as the men walked away, dejected. 

"Such gallantry, Herr Kommissar," Charly's friend murmured with mock silkiness, sliding a slender hand from the knot of his tie down over his belly to the front of his tweeds. She stopped short of impropriety, pinched the pleated wool and straightened the fastening of his braces. 

Gereon felt a frisson of something that confused him, and looked up, finding Charly's friend stood nearly a head taller than him and that her icy beauty, comprised of planes and angles and light worthy of Lang or Murnau, contrived and designed for maximum effect, was too perfect for belief. The girl was, like Charly, dark and greyhound lean, too thin for a luxurious curve of hip or breast, smudged with kohl and carmine, and perfumed with something rich and disorientingly heady. But Gereon looked again and saw brawn rendered delicate by poverty, the barely perceptible shade of beard, something about the girl's throat that was like his own.

Charly laughed again, and lightly slapped Gereon's cheek, her beads and spangles jingling, bringing him back to the stark reality of two giggling girls shivering against him in the cold of the street. "Stop gawping and say hello, Inspector Rath. This is Pauli."

"Ich komme aus Budapest. I have papers." Pauli stuttered with a sputter of effervescent laughter that spilled out to be answered by Charly, exploding into some joke that was entirely lost on Gereon, before Pauli added easily, with flawless Berliner schnauze, "Shall we go?"

Pauli was, Gereon supposed, safer working the streets and clubs of Berlin, than he--she--would be in Budapest. As they walked together, an awkward and ungainly six-legged beast of different heights and gaits, Pauli chattered, explaining animatedly to Gereon that she'd run away to Berlin with the youngest son of a family of bankers, and been left unceremoniously and penniless in a suite at the Adlon three years before. Charly laughed or interjected with scandalized theatricality at appropriate moments--she'd obviously heard this story and been party to its embellishment. Gereon was self-consciously aware of the ease of his arms around both of them, the motion of Charly's hip against his, how small she felt in comparison to Pauli, how small he himself felt in comparison to Pauli. He relished the weight of Charly's slender arm around his neck, the ghost of her accidental touch to his ear when Pauli playfully tilted his hat to a deliberately rakish angle. Once inside, beyond the unmarked door under the Friedrichstraße station and past the ramshackle cloak room where a bored looking gamine in a smoking jacket manned the ticket counter, Pauli left them with kisses, sailing away on the arm of a boy Gereon was quite sure he'd seen in a brown shirt and jodhpurs only hours before. 

The evening was a blur as the rhythm took over, Gereon losing jacket, then tie and waistcoat, finding himself first in shirtsleeves then down to vest and braces and wet to the skin doing the Black Bottom with Charly. Dancing with Charly was like dancing with a live flame, but he could keep up. That Pauli had come back to find them, and dragged them both, giggling again, together with her brownshirt into the ladies toilet where they stood together over the bowl, snorting bumps of white from Pauli's tiny spoon, didn't hurt. Back on the floor with Charly in a Lindy Hop that earned them their own space and vocally appreciative onlookers, Gereon tried on inside his head an American phrase he'd read in a letter from Severin that had arrived from New York with a packet of 78s: "hot jazz baby." It was apt for Charly. They stopped, panting, and shared a drink from a messily opened bottle of champagne that was passed to Gereon, bubbles flowing over his hand and dripping onto Charly's upturned face as he poured into her open mouth before he took a lengthy, inelegant chug. 

"Ne dufte Stadt ist mein Berlin," Gereon mumbled into her ear.

"I do believe, Herr Kommissar, that you're drunk," Charly answered after taking her own turn. She wiped first her own face, then his, with a sweaty palm that she attempted to dry on his vest. She ran a hand through his wet hair, mussing his carefully pomaded part into disorder and touching the the freshly shorn nape of his neck. Her hair dripped. Kohl and mascara streamed from her dark eyes down her cheeks and only the ghost of a Paris lip was left on her mouth. He wanted to kiss off the last of it, but he didn't know what this was. He wasn’t entire sure they weren’t working. Charly had never been more beautiful and never less like Helga. 

The knowledge was like a slap. Gereon set the bottle on the bar, pulled Charly to him, and manhandled her, screaming and kicking to the delight and renewed interest of their audience, back to the middle of the room where he lost himself again to the music, to Charly, to the inexorable creep of increasing intoxication. They danced--Charleston, Toddle, Shimmy, together, solo, with other partners. Charly's dance card was full. She knew everyone. Everyone remembered him from the last time. He wasn’t used to that. They drank--more champagne, rickeys, Schnapps. And smoked, cigarette after cigarette lit from smoldering butts soon to be carelessly discarded. Gereon didn't remember a word passing between them or the lights coming on. Nor did he remember walking after dawn--did they?--back to Luisenufer. 

But here he was, naked in his dressing gown, in the chair opposite his empty bed. It was late afternoon. He felt his face flush hot with a raw flash of memory: Charly on the rug, her pale pink chemise rucked up to her waist over her bare bottom, the sting and smack of his open palm meeting her flesh. She was laughing, wriggling away, and wore one silk stocking. Through the fug of nausea and pounding headache, Gereon felt his cock rise again, as it had evidently risen before. He lit a cigarette, took a sip of water from the half-empty glass next to his kit on the table, and reached down to his erection, his hand as full as his head. He tried and failed to put in order what had or hadn't happened, what was real, what was imagined. This was a place he found himself too often between alcohol and morphine; between Charly and Helga. 

What Gereon was sure had happened however, made him blush. He loosed his cock and leaned forward, elbows onto knees and head into hands, hands into his hair the way Charly's had been when she'd pushed him down, down to places he'd been few times before. "What do you like, Gereon?" she'd asked after the first breathless kiss. He hadn't known how to answer. She'd called him a prude and he'd liked it. Asked him if he'd go to confession afterwards and he'd liked it. She'd been gentle with him, told him what to do and how to do it, and he'd liked it, succumbing easily to her far greater experience and skill. She'd made him laugh, made him beg, made him speechless with something that went beyond pleasure. And he'd spanked her, because she'd asked him to. He liked that too. 

Charly took Gereon's confession: that until the night he’d stupidly shtupped Elizabeth Behnke, Helga had been his only. The clumsy, joyless rut with a sad-eyed girl in a field brothel who’d been his first and left him with the clap didn’t count. Neither did the appointment that his father had dutifully engaged with a woman to make Gereon a man—Gereon had failed to perform—before he left for the front, the same as had been done for Anno before leaving for university long before the war. That the depravity Gereon saw in Vice in Köln, echoed again in the films he destroyed with Bruno, had once shocked him, until it made him numb. That when the numbness was gone, the moment of realization that deviance in almost all its forms was natural, what he saw play out in Berlin equally turned him on and turned his stomach. At least Berliners were honest about what they wanted. His own dishonesty was equal, in Köln or Berlin: to himself, to Helga, to Charly. In Berlin, since learning from Bruno he could do it, he'd paid to watch girls do to one another things he'd never done, things he wanted to do, things that were natural with Charly. That even once in Berlin—Jeder einmal in Berlin—Helga consented to little beyond the furtive, functional coupling that they were lucky hadn’t made more children, though he'd once believed they made each other happy. Charly granted him absolution of the lot. What Gereon wanted was Charly in whatever way she would have him, even smoked and coked to the gills. 

"I want more of you, Gereon Rath." He remembered that suddenly, and it felt electric, raising gooseflesh over his body as if the words set him free. It happened in Friedrichstraße as they said their rote goodbyes, disheveled and drunk, wild and wired. It was too early for the S-Bahn, too long a wait in the cold for a tram or available taxi, and a long, long way to Moabit on foot. 

"Luisenufer," he responded, as if it meant something to her. 

Charly took his arm and steered him down past Unter den Linden and Stadtmitte to Leipzigerstraße toward Kreuzberg. The lights were on at his preferred pharmacy at Oranienplatz when they passed half an hour later, and people were venturing out on the pavements with sleepy children and dogs. It was Sonnabend. 

***

"What would you do with me if you had me?" Charly teased, surprised and pleased at Gereon's readiness, at her own, that all they'd inhaled and imbibed had impaired neither of them beyond judgment. She kissed his neck, enjoying the way he bucked against her while she touched him, her hand inside the open flies of his trousers and Unterhosen. Slow, so slow. "Ask me to marry you? Install me in a house somewhere? Here? Charlottenburg? Wedding? Wilmersdorf? Take me back to Köln?” The future of any of these imaginary options was bleak, but she couldn’t be bothered by it. They both lived in the present. Thinking of the future only brought disappointment and having him like this was perfectly fine. She laughed gently into his ear at the absurdity of it all. She could smell the alcohol on her own breath, on his, his sweat, her own, cigarettes, starch from his open shirt collar, his shaving soap. The Shalimar she’d taken from Moka Efti along with the beaded gown that she’d left on the rug, the old-fashioned and conservative Kölnischwasser that scented Gereon’s hair and armpits. The first time she noticed it, in the vestibule at the paternoster, it didn't seem to suit him. But now it did, and when they were dancing and the citrus and neroli rose off his skin he smelled clean and new. Though at the Castle, when he was buttoned up tight, it made him him smell like church. 

The longer she knew Gereon, the more she felt like he was lying to himself about who he was. Church was part of that. Men were like that, complicating things that were so simple. The things that Gereon seemed to want were simple. Here now, Charly knew Gereon wanted to fuck, but he'd never ask for it, at least not by name. Here now with her, he was unbuttoning his shirt for the second time tonight. So many buttons. She spoke again, of simple things. "Go to church every Sunday? Give me fat children and a modern Frankfurt kitchen with every bin labelled: Mehl, Kaffee, Zucker?” Were those the things he'd promised his brother's wife? She made the thought and the feelings it invited disappear. Each word was a stroke of his cock that made him shudder against her. 

"No," Gereon whispered, his voice bringing her back. “I could never take you dancing.” She felt his hands in her hair, his hands that were capable rather than elegant though every part of him showed good breeding and wealth. He tucked a curl behind her ear and kissed her cheek, even as he panted and struggled to get closer, then at last slid a hand into her bloomers. It was tender. She liked that. She helped him with his braces and shirt at once, stripping them off his shoulders and onto the carpet with her dress. His trousers went too. And then Gereon Rath stood before her in wan morning light in his impersonally furnished bachelor flat in a hinterhof in Kreuzberg, as drunk as she, and as absurdly undignified as any man with an erection wearing only his unders and hose garters.

"What do you want, Gereon? What do you like?" Charly asked, once he was naked on his back under her, as if he knew enough about what he wanted to answer. She drew back a little to look into his hazel eyes that she sometimes thought were blue. She kissed the dark circles under them, kissed his eyelashes and felt him shiver. She gripped his cock again tightly, making him hiss in pleasure or pain or a little of both. 

"I don't know," he whispered, looking up at her with the same unsureness as the first time she'd left him in Friedrichstraße, the time he'd almost kissed her at the Castle, more recent nights she'd left him at Moka Efti. The way he had the first time he saw her back at the Castle after Bruno, the train, the water. For a moment that first night in Friedrichstraße, as they said Guten Abend, she'd expected him to pull out his wallet, ask "Was kostet..." in his brusk, businesslike way, and refuse to name what it was he was buying. He could have had it, and she'd have taken his marks, and pretended that nothing had happened, the same as she did with Bruno. But if that had happened months before, they wouldn’t be here now, nor would Bruno be standing between them as one of the monumental questions Gereon wouldn’t ask. 

Charly wanted to tell him: Bruno was neither an animal nor someone who wanted to be treated like one, until the end, when he'd come for them both. Even at the darkest and most manipulative, Bruno wanted no more than a rub and tug and conversation, and spoke mostly of Emmi once business was seen to. The services Bruno had manipulated from her were far less degrading than the actual transaction, being made to provide information in exchange for the keeping of secrets that were open if one knew where to ask. But this, tonight, this morning, wasn’t a service. Nor would it have been if she’d taken Gereon’s unoffered cash months before. Charly couldn’t bother to hope that Gereon understood. Too much thinking, just like Bruno, stood in the way. 

Charly didn’t pause to let Gereon figure out how he wanted it, or to let him be indecisive, or far too decisive or gallant in taking the lead. She kissed him again. She liked his kisses. They were sentimental and almost overly gentle, the kind that could last for idle hours. Time they didn't have. She thought of the first one again, how they'd hesitated, even though they were already undressing each other. She mounted him then, there on the floor, and took his cock in as they kissed, her body over his. He said her name—Charlotte, rather than Charly—and something that sounded like a prayer. This was how she wanted it, firmly astride his hips, taking what she needed, guiding his hands, his cock, and later his mouth. She was patient. He was eager and rapt. She gave him her mouth in return and let him finish that way. That he was equally scandalized and grateful was obvious. It looked good on him. It showed her who he was. Gereon Rath was a man Charly liked, very, very much. 

***  
When it was over, they lay together, limp and sated on his bed and shared a cigarette. Gereon looked at Charly, how she sprawled next to him, cigarette between her lips, easy in her nakedness, legs open so that it was easy, so easy to slide his hand between them again. He did, just for a moment that made her arch and smile, before she gently pushed him away with a playful slap that made him remember the night before when it was him and her and Pauli on the street. Charly passed the cigarette to him. 

"Was ist das?" Gereon asked then, first gesturing at their bodies, then inhaling deeply, smoke from his last exhale trailing in the air as the cherry burned bright. The answer he sought was bigger than what was happening--had been, for months--between the two of them. Bigger than what there was to do with himself without Helga and Moritz and the happy family panto that he'd left behind in Schöneburg with enough cash for a luxury return to Köln though he knew they were still in Berlin being looked after by Nyssen. Bigger than the shakes and shock of morphine to vein that kept memories of horses and trenches and failure at bay. How he'd made it through what he and Charly had done together, he didn't know. With morphine things didn’t always work the way they should. Sektlaune vielleicht. Vielleicht auch nicht. His face was numb and his hand shook as he passed the cigarette back to her. 

"Does it have to be anything?" Charly countered. "Can't it just be this? Can't you just take me dancing?" Her head lolled against his shoulder as she took a final drag. 

Gereon stubbed out the cigarette in the saucer he kept on the bedside table as an ashtray. He smoked in bed far too often. He put his arm around Charly's bony shoulders and pulled her closer. He was surprised she didn't resist, that she melted against him before rising onto an elbow to look down at him. Her face was serious but for a small enigmatic smile that came as her dark eyes moved over him. She idly touched the scar below his collarbone, where Bruno's bullet had torn into his chest. She touched his eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, the mole on his cheek, and the rasp of stubble on his chin. She traced the evenly spaced and seemingly permanent track of pricks and bruises on the pale flesh of his forearm. He wanted her to kiss him. The words that came out of his mouth were "Fick mich," though his body was far from ready again. 

"You're drunk, Inspector Rath." She touched his lips and he opened them to let her fingers into his mouth. 

***

Charly had him again, or rather Gereon had her, using hands and mouth when his cock failed him. When she was as spent as he, he relented, and she laughed at his sweet smugness, the grin on his wet face. They didn't speak, but lay close, his hand over hers in the narrow space between them. This, Charly knew, was the most they could offer each other. She watched him fight sleep until he couldn't shake himself awake again. He collapsed heavily beside her, his face now expressionless, eyebrows no longer knit. Charly could see then how young Gereon was, only a few years older than her, or Stephan. She stroked his mussed hair gently and kissed his forehead. He was past sleep, and didn't move when she started at the shrill peal of the telephone. 

Charly rose from the bed and cautiously answered, in the event that it was the Castle. "Rath," she said, as impersonally as possible. She could be anyone. 

"Oh, Charly, it's you." Reinhold Gräf's gentle singsong greeted her and she relaxed. She was due at G Division at noon, which she hadn't told Gereon. 

"I'm on my way. Soon." She stole a glance at Gereon.

"Come now. There was a message for you. It's Pauli."

Charly felt her stomach drop with fear, and was suddenly aware of how impossibly polluted she was. She needed water, and coffee, and food. All three could be had at Aschinger's and might well come up again in the toilet. “What's happened? Is she safe?"

"She's in holding at G division. She was brought in with some SA riffraff from Potsdamer Platz this morning. I've sent word that she's an informant for Sipo, but get here before she's processed to send her home. After all, we know that what her papers say, she is not." 

Charly breathed a sigh of relief and rang off. Gräf knew everyone's secrets. She kept his. She began to tug on her clothing, first satin bloomers and chemise. One shiny black silk stocking, then the other, rolled above the knee. The purloined dress from Moka Efti, heavy with glass beads. Fur trimmed coat, green silk cloche, long kid gloves, patent leather shoes, pearl rope, gold mesh reticule from America. All plainly for the evening when the sun streamed through the still cold spring morning outside. Charly let herself out without looking back. Down Dresdnener Straße to Kottbusser Tor to take the new line to Alexanderplatz. 

At the station was a young couple: a beat cop in blue uniform and shako, kissing a woman goodbye. The woman carried a small suitcase and wore a felt coat, knitted cloche, and broadcloth dress. She was heavily pregnant and held a small boy by the hand. The officer knelt and kissed the child before gently shooing them both onto the train carriage. Charly boarded behind them, seeing that they took a seat while she held the leather strap on the railing. The boy waved happily as the doors closed and the officer beamed, waving back. 

The woman looked tired, but brightened when she caught a glimpse of Charly's dress. "You've been dancing," she said and smiled with something that was joy, goodwill and envy rolled into one.

Charly nodded and smiled too. “I have.”

**Author's Note:**

> Babylon Berlin is that rare and awesome bird: a fandom with two canons. Maybe some is lost in translation to English, but the bookverse is mostly classic hardboiled noir, translated for a British readership. Book Gereon is brash, selfish, kind of a dick, and has few vulnerabilities other than his ego. His drug of choice, cocaine, goes with that, but as things get worse he freely admits to alcoholism. He's a lot like Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther, only a decade younger and less experienced, but he'd never cop to it. Gereon is also hopelessly besotted with Charlotte, the worst boyfriend in the world, and at the beginning of their relationship, still has very conventional ideas about courtship. He barely served in the war, and was never sent to the front for being too young to complete training and deployment before it ended. Anno is well and truly dead, and another brother, Severin, who dodged conscription, lives in New York. There is no Helga, but there was a broken engagement to a suitable girl from a suitable family. A scandal involving a shooting sees book Gereon arriving to Berlin friendless, but not particularly brokenhearted, with nothing left to lose, tenuous professional connections, and a chip on his shoulder.
> 
> Book Charly is the modern woman of the metropolis, of the nascent middle class. She's a law student who is going places, and initially, is full-time stenographer who works nights to accommodate her school schedule. She's independent, parties hard, likes nice things, and works to make money to support a shopping habit. She's not a "working girl," but she is a good time gal, and might take a man's money on a lark. She's a little like The New Yorker's Lois Bancroft Long, who would come straight into the news desk after being out all night. Charly does not want a future defined by homemaking or motherhood, but she is deeply in love with Gereon, and is painfully aware that he's arguably a losing prospect. She has a keen understanding of how her experience of the world is mitigated by structural sexism, and is occasionally so well written I feel pandered to. And then I read Katherina von Ankum's Women in the Metropolis and watched Menschen am Sonntag for the millionth time, and the penny dropped that Volker Kutscher is just really damned good at writing women, or at least one woman, and actually spent some time thinking about what it would be like to do police work backwards and in high heels. In some respects, Charlotte is a more three-dimensional character than Gereon, even though she gets less page time, and I'm sad that my German is lightyears from good enough to try to read the books as they were written. 
> 
> We know our TV boos. Gereon is vulnerable, arguably broken, makes bad decisions, thinks too much, and is totally a junkie. Charly is whip smart and makes do with what she can get until she sets her sights on something. We know that Gereon is "very Catholic" and "believes in God" and is wound way too tight. We know that Charly can go harder than Gereon could ever imagine and that she's completely outside the realm of his experience. These two are going to crash into each other at some point and it's not going to be pretty. We also know that Reinhold Gräf is a secret master of mad drag and that Stephan Jänicke was too sweet to live.


End file.
